ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble)is dedicated to reshaping the way music is created and experienced. With a flexible roster of 33 leading instrumentalists performing in forces ranging from solos to large ensembles, ICE functions as performer, presenter, and educator, advancing the music of our time by developing innovative new works and pursuing groundbreaking strategies for audience engagement. In an era of radical change, ICE redefines concert music as it brings together new work and new listeners. Since its founding in 2001, ICE has premiered over 500 compositions, the bulk of them by emerging composers, in venues ranging from New York’s Lincoln Center and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to galleries, bars, clubs, and schools around the world. The ensemble has released acclaimed albums on the Bridge, Naxos, Tzadik and New Focus labels, with forthcoming releases on Nonesuch, Kairos and Mode. With leading support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ICE launched ICElab in early 2011. This new program places teams of ICE musicians in close collaboration with six emerging composers each year to develop works that push the boundaries of musical exploration. ICElab projects will be featured in more than twenty performances each season and documented online through DigitICE, a new online venue.

On the ProgramWith support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ICE launched ICElab in 2011. The program places teams of ICE musicians in close collaboration with emerging composers to develop works that push the boundaries of musical exploration. Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’sPhonobellow, an hour-long new music theater work for five musicians, electronics, and large-scale performative installation, is the result of this collaborative process. Taking as their starting point the year 1877, Di Castri and Adamcyk explore how Muybridge’s high-speed camera and Edison’s phonograph have marked human perception. Via a heterogeneous assemblage of music, images, recorded texts/sounds, electronics, movement, sculpture, and lighting, the piece seeks to capture how deeply these inventions reverberated with people at the time, and continue to reverberate to this day. Watch a trailer for Phonobellow here.

In contrast to the imposing Phonobellow, Natacha Diels’ An Economy of Means explores the small scale with DIY electronics, choreographed movement, performer controlled lighting, vocalizations, and a miniature drum kit. By avoiding the temptation of writing for a large setup, this quirky percussion solo (written for ICE’s Ross Karre) reflects the obsessive concentration that most percussionists bring to their practice, while at the same to invoking the clangorous freedom and ritualistic intimacy of child’s play. At once experimental, repetitive, and humorous, An Economy of Means follows its own unusual internal logic. Diels’ compositions have been described as "a fairy tale for a fractured world" (Music We Care About) and "fantastic playful modern chamber music full of magic and wit" (Vital Weekly).

Bulgarian composer/experimental vocalist Maria Stankova offers a new work for voice and clarinet which she performs with ICE’s Joshua Rubin. Stankova’s work interweaves multi-linguistic poetry fragments in an exquisite study of harmony. Her unique approach to the human voice reflects her experience singing classical music with the Bulgarian National Radio Youth Choir, studying vocal folk techniques from the Shop region of Bulgaria, and improvising in the NY experimental new music scene.

Zosha Di Castriisa Canadian composer/pianist living in New York. Her work spans acoustic and electronic music, sound installation, multimedia projects, and collaborative work in video and dance. Her orchestral compositions have been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Esprit Orchestra, and the National Arts Center Orchestra, and have been featured by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Amazonas Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, among others. Zosha has made appearances with the Chicago Symphony and the L.A. Philharmonic in their chamber music series and has worked with many leading new music groups including Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, ICE, Ekmeles, the NEM, and JACK Quartet. She was the recipient of the 2012 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for her work Cortège, and participated in IRCAM’s Manifeste Festival, writing an interactive electronic work for Thomas Hauert's dance company, ZOO. Zosha holds a D.M.A. in Composition from Columbia University and was appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia in 2014.

David Adamcykis a Canadian composer living in New York. He creates musical works for the concert hall and theatrical stage, often incorporating technology. He was the assistant to Martin Matalon and Philippe Leroux, has collaborated with artist Julia Randall, and has worked with Quasar, Cairn, the MSO, Talea, ECM+, IRCAM, Esprit Orchestra, and SMCQ. David has taken part in the Nouvelles Rencontres composition program at Domaine Forget, in St-Iréné, and was selected for the National Arts Center's Young Composers program in Ottawa. He has won four prizes at the SOCAN Foundation composer’s competition, and was also one of the five finalists in the CBC/SRC Evolution composition competition. David holds a doctorate in Composition from McGill University, and currently teaches at the Columbia Computer Music Center.

Maria Stankova is a singer and composer from Bulgaria. Her works have been performed by On Structure, Ekmeles, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Ensemble Pamplemousse. Stankova is a founding member of the live electronics duo Pygmy Jerboa, who has released two albums—Top Secret Jazz on Abolipop (2011) and Change still more again on Mandorla (2012). She is also a member of the New York-based composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse. She has performed with the Yale Women's Slavic Chorus and the Children's Chorus of the Bulgarian National Radio, and she is currently a member of the Bulgarian folk chorus “Nusha” led by Neli Andreeva. Stankova is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at New York University, where she is writing her dissertation on the modernization and globalization of Bulgarian folk singing.

Natacha Dielsis a composer and performer from New Mexico. She founded the experimental chamber group Ensemble Pamplemousse and has been its executive director since 2002; she is also one-half of the performance duo On Structure. Natacha's music has been performed by Pamplemousse, On Structure, Yarn/Wire, JACK quartet, SEM ensemble, TAK, The Treble Girls (Anne la Berge and Diamanda Dramm), Ensemble Adapter, and Maria Stankova. It has been presented by the MATA Festival (NYC), Subtropics XXI and Twelve Nights (Miami), AMODA (Austin), the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Bar Harbor Music Festival, as well as in Europe by the Rotation Series for New Music and Sonaar Quartet. Natacha can be heard as a flautist on New World Records (with Christian Wolff) and as flautist and composer on Carrier Records (with Pamplemousse). She holds a D.M.A. in Composition from Columbia University. Natascha is an Assistant Professor in Composition at U.C. San Diego.

Linda Dusman is Professor of Music at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). As a composer and sound artist, her work explores contemporary life from the personal to the political. Dr. Dusman founded I Resound Press, a digital press/ archive of music by women composers, and was a founding editor of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Her articles have appeared in the journals Link, Perspectives of New Music, Interface, and several anthologies, and her music is available from Neuma Records and Publications.

​Elizabeth Hoffman is Professor of Music at New York University, and composes in acoustic and computer-driven media with particular interest in the use of timbre, texture, and spatialization as expressive signifiers. She writes on analysis and representation in electroacoustic and avant-garde musics, with articles in the Computer Music Journal, Organized Sound, and Perspectives of New Music. In 2015, she was awarded a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony.